On 27 September 2001, Friedrich Leibacher entered the regional parliament of Zug (Switzerland) and opened fire on local politicians, killing 14 and wounding 14 others severely. While the rampage shooting sent shockwaves across Swiss society, it did not have any direct repercussions for the country’s gun laws, despite the fact that the perpetrator had been a licensed gun owner. A few years later, on 11 May 2006, Hans van Themsche bought a rifle in the Belgian town Antwerp, left the store and shot a woman of Malian descent and her child to death on the street. As a result of the event, the Belgian gun laws immediately came under political scrutiny and were overhauled significantly within a short period of time. In both cases, the perpetrators had acquired their murder weapons by legal means. Yet, although both events signified very similar policy failures, their political processing could have hardly been more different. This book sets out to provide a better understanding of the conditions under which rampage shootings lead to the politicization of gun control and the factors that facilitate and obstruct the reform process. The motivation for this endeavour originates from several observations.
First, while the causes of rampage shootings have received considerable attention in the disciplines of psychology (e.g. Verlinden et al. 2000), criminology (e.g. Levin and Madfis 2009), and sociology (e.g. Harding et al. 2002), the political consequences of these events have hardly been analysed systematically from a comparative political science perspective. Given the fact that rampage shootings have resulted in very different policy responses over the course of the past decades, this scientific neglect appears quite surprising. While some countries instituted drastic restrictions on civilian gun ownership in the wake of rampage shootings, reform initiatives petered out without any political consequences in other cases. As Parker (2011: 8) notes:
The precise relationship between mass shooting incidents and particular legal responses is far from clear. In many cases, these incidents have acted as a driver to strengthen gun laws, but because legislative responses are ultimately political, and thus negotiated, outcomes vary widely.
This variance in terms of political fallout represents a veritable research puzzle, which has not yet been addressed, despite its indisputable societal relevance. Thus, what is still lacking is a systematic comparative approach that is designed to identify the conditions under which rampage shootings become subject to politicization and lead to policy change. In the European context, some instructive case studies on the most devastating events have provided us with some valuable insights into the political dynamics that have followed individual massacres (e.g. Karp 2003; Peters and Watson 1996; Thomson et al. 1998). However, these case studies have invariably put the empirical focus on positive cases, i.e. cases with political consequences. As a result, the scarce knowledge we have to date is based on the most influential, and thereby hardly representative, cases.
Second, this latter argument is further aggravated by the overwhelming geographical focus of the remaining academic literature on the United States, and in particular on the school shooting at the Columbine High School of Littleton, Colorado (Altheide 2009; Birkland and Lawrence 2009; Fleming 2012; Haider-Markel and Joslyn 2001; Lawrence 2001; Lawrence and Birkland 2004). The problem caused by this narrow empirical focus is obvious. Based on the fact that the USA is an extreme outlier with regard to gun policy arrangements on many accounts, the findings that can be gained by studying this particular case can also hardly be generalized to a wider population of countries. The exceptional status of the US is not only based on its very special legal, cultural and institutional background, but also on the disproportional occurrence of severe rampage shootings in the country and a generally elevated problem pressure due to high homicide rates. Therefore, it is impossible to make more general statements on the political processing of rampage shootings solely based on empirical evidence from the United States. In order to arrive at such statements, it is imperative to employ a comparative research design that incorporates empirical evidence from a multitude of different institutional settings. This approach is clearly justified given the fact that while the United States suffers the most under repeated rampage violence, existing research demonstrates that mass shootings are anything but an exceptionally American phenomenon (Lankford 2016).
One of the reasons for the existence of the research gap lies in the difficulty to incorporate events like rampage shootings into a coherent theoretical framework of policy change due to their often-random occurrence. Given this difficult endeavour, it might often appear easier to conceptualize such events as ‘random errors’, which evade scientific consideration because of their unpredictability. Throughout this book, I argue that this is not the way we should approach the phenomenon of external shocks in general and rampage shootings in particular. Past studies have shown that potential focusing events can have substantial transformative power and that their occurrence can have dramatic consequences for public policies (Birkland 2006; Kingdon 1984). One rather recent example for such an event is the nuclear disaster which occurred in Fukushima (Japan) in 2011. The catastrophe led the German government to phase out the production of nuclear energy, whereas other countries showed no political reaction at all. Thus, even though the occurrence of such potential focusing events is more or less random, this does not mean that the political reactions they evoke are random as well. Instead, it seems sensible to suspect that the way potential focusing events are processed and ultimately cause (or do not cause) policy change depends on the configurations and interplay of different contextual conditions. The acquisition of a better understanding of the mechanisms linking an event to the politicization of its implied policy failure to actual reforms is one of the continuing challenges of policy change research. However, the puzzle of why similar events lead to very different political outcomes is not only relevant from an academic point of view. It is also a matter that regularly pops up in the public debate and therefore bears substantial societal relevance. As Schildkraut and Cox Hernandez (2014: 371) note, ‘understanding how legislatures respond to incidents of mass shootings, both on and off school campuses, is important in the continual understanding of how people perceive and understand these random acts of violence’.
Building on these considerations, this book pursues an empirical, a theoretical and a methodological objective: First, as the first systematic and internationally comparative analysis of the political processing of rampage shootings, the book assembles a wealth of empirical evidence on 17 events which have occurred in different geographical and temporal settings. So far, no study has gone beyond an analysis of more than two cases and therefore, the envisioned contribution of data is unique and hopefully helpful for future studies on crisis-induced policy change. Second, with regard to its theoretical aspirations, the book seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how political systems process potential focusing events politically. Existing theoretical frameworks handle these types of events quite differently and fail to come up with convincing causal mechanisms which can explain why some shocks are taken up by a political system and why others are not. Accordingly, the book analyses the relevance of several conditions that have the potential to serve as causal links between a focusing event, the politicization of the implied policy failure and the occurrence of policy change. The core argument of the book is that those conditions do not function in isolation from one another and that both politicization and policy change can result from different causal paths. In contrast to many other empirical applications in the social sciences, however, this book does not treat such patterns of equifinality as a fundamental obstacle complicating the acquisition of scientific knowledge, but as an empirical reality, which should be taken seriously. A good and systematic inquiry into equifinal processes enables more precise statements about the world than overly simplified models which sacrifice precision for parsimony by default. Based on this argument, the final contribution of the book is a methodological one. Specifically, the study seeks to explore the suitability of fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) (Ragin 1987, 2000; Schneider and Wagemann 2012) for the analysis of the political processes unfolding after potential focusing events. Unlike most QCA applications, the book defines individual events, instead of countries, as the unit of analysis and examines their variant political impacts in a comparative manner. The book shows that while fsQCA is a very useful methodological tool if the theoretical concepts under examination can be translated convincingly into set-theoretic language, the application of the method is more difficult if we cannot rely on solid, quantitative data in order to calibrate the required sets. Consequently, the book combines fsQCA with comparative case studies in order to answer two research questions: First, why do some rampage shootings immediately lead to controversial political debates over the affected country’s gun control arrangements, while other rampage shootings are completely ignored by policy makers? Second, why do some events that get politicized lead to rapid policy reforms, while the momentum for policy change fades quickly in other instances? Building on the scarce literature available, the book develops a set of theoretical expectations on the factors driving both politicization and policy change after potential focusing events in general and rampage shootings in particular. While the research puzzle on varying patterns of politicization is addressed by the use of fsQCA, the second research puzzle on policy change is addressed by 12 case studies on the politicized events in order to identify the combinations of factors that facilitate or impede the reform process.
At this point, it should be emphasized that the book does not seek to resolve the debate on the effectiveness of gun control measures in preventing crime committed with firearms. The debate on this issue is led by both sides with strong convictions (e.g. Donohue and Ayres 2009; Lott 2003, 2010) and I will not take sides here. Changes in gun control measures are outcomes the study seeks to explain, not the independent variable. Finally, it is essential to clarify that the book is not about policy change in the firearm policy subsystem in general. This would require a theoretical and empirical approach that is fundamentally different from the one adopted by this book. Instead, the book is about the political reactions towards a specific type of potential focusing event and the comparative analysis of the political reactions evoked by these empirical phenomena for a specific policy area. Accordingly, the book takes the shootings as a given and analyses their outcomes in terms of ensuing politicization dynamics and policy change in the area of gun control in a comparative manner. This is a direct consequence from choosing shootings as cases and not countries or governments. In other words, nothing in the book suggests that countries cannot change their gun policies in the absence of a rampage shooting. In fact, there are examples of countries which have changed their firearm regimes in response to international agreements, like the European Union’s Firearm Directive.1 Other than that, however, firearm-related policy change rarely occurs without an external stimulus, and this stimulus often comes in the form of a rampage shooting.
The book is structured as follows: Chapter 2 delineates the key concepts used throughout the book. This concerns the definition of rampage shootings as instances of potential focusing events, a specification of how this book conceives of politicization, and a conceptualization of the ambiguous term policy change. After those conceptual clarifications, the current state of the art in policy change research is discussed in Chapter 3 with a particular emphasis on the role of potential focusing events as catalysts for policy change dynamics. This is accomplished in two parts. In the first part, the central theoretical frameworks that have been put forward over the past decades are addressed and put into perspective concerning the research question. The second part presents the most relevant empirical studies available, elucidates their relative strengths and weaknesses and distils their implications for the present inquiry. Chapter 4 develops a set of theoretical expectations on the causal mechanisms which potentially constitute empirical linkages between the occurrence of a rampage shooting, the subsequent politicization of gun control, policy change and stability. Those theoretical expectations structure the empirical section of the book. Chapter 5 first presents the rationale behind the case selection, then defines scope conditions and provides some descriptive information on the resulting pool of cases. In addition, this chapter contains a brief introduction to the terminology and epistemology of (fs)QCA, which will function as the method of comparison in the first section of the empirical analysis on politicization. Chapter 6 presents the results of the fsQCA on the causal paths that link the occurrence of a rampage shooting to the politicization of gun control. Based on the findings for the first research question, Chapter 7 presents case studies on the 12 cases that led to the politicization of gun control in order to address the second research puzzle on policy change. The empirical analyses yield a range of intriguing new insights into the political processing of rampage shootings. In a nutshell, the first analysis demonstrates that the politicization of gun control after a rampage shooting can result from two equifinal processes. If the gun control issue is represented by a partisan cleavage in the affected country’s party system, the party that owns the issue will try to provoke a political debate. However, it will be demonstrated that, contrary to conventional wisdom, this only holds true if elections are not imminent. If elections are close, even political actors who have a reputation of favouring policy change will be cautious to try and exploit the crisis politically. The other path towards politicization results from a conjunction of high event severity and high media attention. If an event is severe in objective terms and simultaneously portrayed as such by the media, policy makers cannot escape a political debate over gun control, regardless of the proximity of elections and the cleavage structure of the party system. As far as the second research question on policy change is concerned, the case studies demonstrate that a multitude of factors can obstruct and facilitate the reform process, depending on their configuration. In particular, the empirical evidence demonstrates that in order to arrive at a good understanding of the various political processes triggered by rampage shootings, we must evaluate the role of political and societal actors in their special institutional environment. Specifically, it is found that while both political and socio-cultural institutions can facilitate and impede policy change dynamics after rampage shootings based on their configuration, the extent to which reform opponents act as a cohesive group and varying levels of societal mobilization critically qualify the influence of these institutional factors. Accordingly, policy change and stability after rampage shootings results from the complex interplay of bo...
